She answered many questions as best she could.
The one she had prepared for, and dreaded, arrived on a bright October afternoon while they were carving pumpkins at the kitchen table.
Bridget looked up from her carefully triangular eyes and asked, “Why don’t we have a mommy like Lucy at school?”
The room went very quiet.
Margot stopped scooping pumpkin pulp. Theodore set down his spoon.
Children, Dorothy had learned, knew when the important truths were being approached. They fell still the way deer do before crossing roads.
Dorothy wiped her hands on a towel and sat down.
“You do have a mommy,” she said gently. “Her name was Colleen. She was my daughter. She loved you before you were born. She died the day you came into the world.”
Theodore’s lower lip trembled. “Because of us?”
“No.” Dorothy’s answer was immediate and firm. “Never because of you. She died because her body got hurt while bringing you here. And she would tell you herself, if she could, that you were wanted. All three of you. Very, very wanted.”
Margot frowned. “Then where is she?”
Dorothy looked toward the window where the late sun lit the garden Colleen had once planted and Dorothy had learned to keep alive.
“In every story I tell you,” she said. “In the flowers she loved. In the yellow walls upstairs. In the letters she wrote. In the way you laugh, and argue, and love things hard. She is not here the way we want, but she is not gone from us.”
Bridget, ever the practical one, asked, “Do we get to see the letters?”
“Not all of them yet.”
“When?”
“When you’re old enough to understand them without carrying what children should never have to carry.”
Margot, who hated partial information, narrowed her eyes. “That is not a real answer.”
Dorothy smiled sadly. “It’s the truest one I have today.”
That night, after they were asleep, Dorothy opened the small cedar box in her closet where she kept Colleen’s letters, the journal, the first ultrasound with purple hearts drawn around three blurry forms, and a tiny pair of white baby shoes with yellow daisies.
She ran her fingers over the box lid and wondered, not for the first time, how motherhood remained active long after the daughter was gone. How every stage of the triplets’ growing required Dorothy to decide not only what to say, but when to say it.
There was still more truth ahead.
Grant had petitioned twice for limited contact over the years.